ISC'14

Dr. Federico Spedalieri

Dr. Spedalieri obtained his degree of Licenciado en Ciencias Fisicas from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1994, and his PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 2003. He worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and at the EE Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2010, he joined the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California as a Computer Scientist. He has worked on the characterization of entangled states, devising a numerical test that is widely used to decide whether a given state is entangled (these results, published in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review A has been cited more than 200 times). This work pioneered the application of semi-definite programming methods in quantum information that have since been applied on a wide range of problems. He has also worked on implementations of quantum computing using linear optics, devised a protocol that exploits orbital angular momentum states of photons to implement quantum key distribution, and has designed a low latency implementation of fault-tolerant quantum computing suited for planar architectures with local interactions. Currently, Dr. Spedalieri is working to bridge the gap between the adiabatic quantum computing model (and its incarnation in the form of the adiabatic quantum computer D-Wave Two) and applications to many different fields, such as model checking, natural language processing, scheduling and planning, and complex system design. He is also actively studying the physics behind the operation of D-Wave Two, aiming at understanding the roles that quantumness and entanglement play in its operation, and designing experiments to validate these studies.